First time joining a Ludum Dare! This is going to be exciting! :D

For anyone interested - the toolset I'm going to use: - Game Maker Studio 2 - Aseprite - beepbox (or FamiTracker if time allows) - sfxr

The development will be livestreamed @ Twitch.tv (twitch.tv/herrdekay). I'll also try to update the devblog during LD as often as possible. Due to the unfortunate timing for Europe though (the jam will start at 3am in the morning for me), I'm probably going to be kinda short on time. We'll see how it goes!

If I'm actually able to finish my game, I'll also try to release the GMS2 source after the LDJam deadline.

Also looking forward to playing all the other entries! :D

Soo! The first day of LD39 has gone by and despite being incredibly doubtful I'd make ANY progress at all in my first game jam, I'm actually quite happy with the current state of the project. First things first, though.

The Theme

To be honest, I wasn't a huge fan of the chosen theme at first. I guess the whole "running out of power" thing just lends itself a little bit to well to the idea of "just" having another time limit in your game. Nevertheless at first I came up with three different ideas: - a coffee simulator, where you just have to get through your work day by brewing the best coffee imaginable - a kind of puzzle platformer where every move you make gets weaker as you constantly lose energy - a twitch platformer where the levels and enemies will change depending on the lights being on or off

In the end, thanks to the input of my lovely Twitch chat (the whole shebang was live streamed after all), I basically decided on a mix between the puzzle and the twitch platformer.

So! Meet the Hyper Battery Girl: Batty Ree!

The current idea is to have the main character be able to accumulate an store energy when running over charging panels and using this energy up to do special moves and attacks to progress through the stage. When you run out of energy or overcharge too much, you die.

The Game

So, the game! As stated in my very first blog post, I'm using Game Maker Studio 2 for the project. Besides my own set of helper scripts (for managing sprites, state machines and controls, as well as some smaller convenience scripts) I'll avoid any external resources or libraries.

The game revolves around really tight physics and fast platforming. As such, getting the physics just right took a big chunk of the tight schedule! In the end, I'm sure it will be worth it though. I'm quite happy with the current (though unfinished) flow of the controls.

After getting the really basic prototype to work, it was time to start on creating a few assets. I'm not really a composer nor a sprite artist, so that whole thing took probably longer than it should've, but hey ¯_(ツ)_/¯. For the sprites I used Aseprite, an absolutely amazing tool for doing pixel art! Most sprites and tiles are only 8x8 px so the whole creation process wasn't too much of a headache. Still took my talentless butt a really long while to finish, haha!

For the music I decided to go with beepbox.co. I first tried to make something work with one of those music generators but I was never happy with the outcome. So I went to beepbox and just threw a quick tune together, which will be the main track playing throughout the game.

Finally, I thought it was an amazing idea to start debugging my code in the middle of the night. It worked out well, but I guess I'll need a lot of coffee today.

You know, to not run out of energy! Nyehehehehehehehe... sorry.

Anyway! GIFs! Progress! Here you go: (note that everything is still in a rough state)

http://i.imgur.com/sn16ZoC.gifv (as a link since the GIF was too big for this upload :|)

Now on to Day 2! Time to finalize and polish everything! o/

Day 2 was almost exlusively dedicated to adding polish and most of the features to the game. So now I can actually start putting together some levels! Yay!

The Progressening

Development for Day 2 went much more smoothly than I could ever have anticipated. Most of tiles and sprites I need to make everything work were finalized. The game now even has a couple of proper enemies! And a death state, so you can actually lose! Most important thing was the completion of the charge/discharge system for special moves and attacks. When your energy counter falls to zero, you will now become incredibly slow. If you charge too much energy, you will die though. This concept allows for some interesting level design, were you have to juggle your energy a bit while trying to get to the goal as fast as possible. Most of the gameplay and effects were also polished and I added a lot of sound effects to pretty much everything, so you'll get some nice and (hopefully) obvious feedback for anything you do.

...oh! And there's dynamic music now! Because why not?

The Final Day

Day 3 will be completely commited to: - Polishing the last few bits of gameplay and adding an actual win state - Adding a basic start and end screen - Adding levels (because else there won't be much of a game, right?)

I'm pretty optimistic that I'll actually be able to meet the deadline in 15 hours!

Also I decided to not release the source code for the game when it's done (sorry!). That's not because there's anything super-secret in there, but just because I produced A LOT of high-quality spaghetti code yesterday. No sane person should have to look at that.

Sane persons CAN look at nice GIFs though! (mostly nice. My GIF Recorder destroyed some frames. RIP)

On to Day 3!

So! I finally found some time to write another (and probably my final) blog post for LD39.

I will keep it relatively short by saying that the whole experience so far has been amazing! As I said in previous blogs, this was the first Game Jam I've ever joined and I never would've thought that I'd actually be able to complete a game in 72 hours.

But I did! And now here we are. While my game does have a few problems stemming from the tight schedule, most of the people who played it seemed to rather like it - which is so fantastic! Some people also asked about making a full version of the game which is a thing I'm seriously considering at this moment. Code refactoring is already ongoing, after which I will make my final decision if Hyper Battery Girl becomes a full game or not. We'll see!

It was also absolutely heartwarming to experience all the support from my Twitch chat which was really active and helpful during the Ludum Dare Gamedev streams. So thanks to every single one of my viewers! You've been amazing!

And finally! During the streams a lot of people did some fanworks for Hyper Battery Girl and they're all fantastic. Never would've thought I'd ever create something that will spawn actual fan art in the end! Haha! :D I compiled all the fanworks in the imgur album below:

http://imgur.com/a/hOLB5

Thanks again to everyone who supported me during this LD! It was a fantastic experience! Really looking forward to participating in the next Game Jam! :D

After an amazing LD39 I'm really looking forward to this one!

Toolset: - GameMaker Studio 2 - beepbox.co and FamiTracker - Aseprite - bfxr

Also I hope I'll find more time to play everyone's games :D

Alright! First day of LD40 is over and while I REALLY didn't think I could work with the given theme, I managed. After some incredibly fun crowdsourcing with my Twitch chat I can present you:

Guinea Post - Rodent Delivery!

Yes, those are indeed guinea pigs. Yes, some of them wear sombreros. Yes, it doesn't make any sense!

The goal is to have a game kinda close to Cook, Serve, Delicious. Basically you are a post office worker in your own little office. Day by day more and more guinea pigs will keep showing up giving you more and more tasks you have to complete. If you fail to get enough points at the end of a day, you'll lose and you'll have to restart the level. Will you be able to handle ALL the guinea pigs and their neverending squeaking?

Day 1 was really successful so far! I already created a bunch of assets and a lot of basic code, so tomorrow I can completely focus on implementing the main game loop. Day 3 will possibly be used for polish only - if everything goes well, that is!

I'm really looking forward to sharing this one with you! Until tomorrow!

Soooooo! I kinda forgot to post the last few devlogs for my jam entry.

Oops!

Anyhoo! My game "Guinea Post - Rodent Delivery" is done and finished! You can find the download here on the LDJam page. I will post another "aftermath" blog in a couple of days. Until then, have fun! :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/guinea-post-rodent-delivery